Of course you can imagine Ray Lewis as a wrestler. His pregame "squirrel" dance might as well have been an audition tape for WWE. He spoke as if Vince McMahon was spoonfeeding him lines, then lacing the words with 5-Hour Energy.

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So when Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, former WWE star and the face of HBO's new "Ballers" show, came on "The Dan Patrick Show" on Friday to chat about his glory days on the mat, it was interesting to hear him mention the retired linebacker as a one-time candidate to guest-star at a WrestleMania during his playing days. But then again, who else would WWE have reached out to? Certainly not Trent Dilfer.

"There was a time when WWE was at its height during a certain era, what we call now the Attitude Era, when I was there, 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, The Undertaker and guys like that," Johnson told Patrick at about the 2:50 mark of the above video. "There was a time where we were actually recruiting both those guys [Lewis and Warren Sapp] to come in and have a big match, and we'd gotten very close with having a big match, bringing in Ray Lewis. And we were gonna have a big tag-team match with myself, Ray Lewis as tag-team partners against whoever the top heels were at the time — probably Triple H, I think, and somebody else?

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"And it was gonna be a big WrestleMania match, but we could never … it had nothing to do with the creative, just more so scheduling, but we were very, very excited, so we came very close to that. But both those guys would've done great in the ring. And just really, really exceptional athletes."

Maybe there's still time, Ray. You wouldn't have to explain how you hurt your elbow chokeslamming someone to Brian Billick. You can bring back the squirrel dance. And spending time in the ring has to be better than doing pushups with Steve Harvey, right?

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